


Equal Parts Blood and Need

by wolfinpink



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: Blood Magic, F/F, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-09
Updated: 2016-02-09
Packaged: 2018-05-19 08:36:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5960992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wolfinpink/pseuds/wolfinpink
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hawke tongues the thin line between life death on the Wounded Coast and her lover - Merrill - uses the only option she has left to her - blood magic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Equal Parts Blood and Need

**Author's Note:**

> Kinda fluffy. Near death experiences. Merrill's in deep yo. I don't know what I'm doing. Merrill/F!Hawke.
> 
> This is my first thing ever ever ever (writing or published online) of fan fiction. All critique, praise, whatever is so completely appreciated. Thankyou lovelies!

Bandits blood. Freshly spilt, drying in the cracks of her skin already, under the bake of the Wounded Coast’s sun. Merrill feels like she might crack too, when each step towards Hawke’s stilled body feels so heavy it may split the earth. She’d welcome a reprieve from these next few moments, better to slip beneath the dirt at her feet instead of sinking to the side of her lover, vision trained on half-lidded, unmoving eyes.

Unfocused magic shakily winds ‘round her fingers in trestles as her knees hit the ground beside Hawke, pulling on the spells she knows so well, but earth and stone and blood can’t do much here. Healing magic never fit comfortably next to the crumbling strength of stone, or the flood of blood power that sits at her centre.

“H-Hawke. Get up, it’s time to go. They’re gone, they’ve all gone.”

Her hands reach forward but are unsure where to land, there’s so much _blood_. Instead they skirt Hawke’s shape like small frightened birds might hover erratically over a dangerous stretch of earth. The lacerations in her lips drip like red tears, the wet trails too thick and heavy to dry as quickly as the splatter on Merrill’s arms. Small noises begin to escape the Dalish mage’s lips, a cold stitch of fear fixed in her gut to rival the heat her constantly shivering body makes.

Aveline appears, and is down beside them both in a moment. Her sure movements shame Merrill’s uncertainty in a crisis. Aveline’s turned head moves to Hawke’s face and she silences Merrill’s mewing with a harsh glance.

“Breathing.” The warrior says, and the cold stitch loosens a fraction.

“But it’s shallow.” Aveline pulls away and straightens her armor, raking the length of Hawke’s body with calculating eyes, “she won’t make it to the clinic.”

The stitch pulls tight and sets on fire. Blackening fear and hope alike, burning away the stillness Merrill’s panic had caged her in.

“What? No. She has to. A-Anders can fix anything. He re-attached a finger once. I saw it. It was that elven merchant from Lowtown, he-”

“Hush Daisy,” how long had Varric been behind her? “We don’t give up so easily.”

Aveline shoots a look over Merrill’s shoulder at the dwarf that she doesn’t understand. Eyes steely but soft. People who didn’t know her could never tell, but her hardness didn’t make its way down to her bones. Underneath the sodden grey taste of iron, was sweetness only savoured by a few. Distantly, Merrill let loose thoughts of how lucky she was to have seen behind Aveline’s wall. The miracle of that made sweeter since she knew she’d been - turned inside out once.

Hawke had told her about the escape from Lothering.

About Wesley.

About how she’d driven a dagger into _two_ hearts in one swift movement. She knew how pulling the blade out had brought a fresh torrent of Wesley’s insides, but also wrenched Aveline the wrong way ‘round too. It pulled at her edges till she rolled in on herself, like Hawke’s discarded socks, just as worn and blackened from being pressed to the earth by deaths boot. It twisted her till she was rotted soft, bruised sweetness on the outside and burnt black with brittle taint on the in. For a few days at least, Hawke had said. Aveline didn’t waste time making herself right again.

Merrill’s eyes sting and she realises she has been staring unblinking at her hand, now somehow gripping Hawke’s. The knowledge comes quickly then and it is stark against the pulling confusion in her chest: she knows she won’t be able to turn herself back the right way if she loses this woman.

“I’ve got two. We’ll make them count.” Varric has come to stand at Hawke’s head, two red health poultices with savagely scratched glass sharply clinking together in his hand.

“Up.” Aveline gestures to Merrill but she doesn’t move. Her hand is as white as Hawke’s under the grip of her desperate fingers, clenching tighter as she lost herself to thoughts. She looks up to where Aveline has risen, firey red hair slicks to her forehead with baked blood. But – there is nothing burning about her; her eyes are cool green sea, unrelenting in their wash of sure strength.

Varric moves to help Merrill away, but Aveline halts him with a small shake of her head. She kneels down and places a warm hand on the two women’s knotted fingers – a cruel tangle of coldly limp and fiercely ridged. Finding her eyes, they lock for a moment. The sea is a great many more things than strength and for a moment they give Merrill a peek at everything else inside: it is a life-giver and it is a home and it is a deep place of holding lost things.

Merrill nods and lets go. The guardswoman swiftly moves to slip her arms beneath Hawke’s neck and knees.

“When I tell this later, I’ll make it forty bandits.” Varric glances around at the smattering of bloodied bodies scaring the ground around them. The great ripped ditches of displaced earth from frantically cast spells look like scabs up the path they’d come.

Aveline grunts with the effort of trying to slide the rag-doll body of Hawke into her arms gently. Merrill follows Varric’s gaze to the bodies. _Which one had it been?_ She wonders stiffly, this bitter acidic anger is unusual for her and it tastes like Lowtown’s unboiled water.

Her eyes fall on a body closest to Hawke, his helmeted face is twisted a bit too far into the dirt as his back is flush with the ground. The rogue had been particularly quick. But now, his dented visor is jutting into his cheek; a pin point accurate force spell so strong it had snapped his neck, while he still held his daggers – dagger.

One hand limply curled around his single weapon’s hilt, the other is spread-eagled at his side, empty. Merrill glances back at her place she had defended on the battlefield, a rough circle of pockmarks in the ground, as she’d called forth the stone to connect and grind together in a makeshift wall of rock armor. He’d snuck up beside her as the stones slid into place along her skin, and her arm still stings from the duel knives he’d tried to dig into her side. The gashes have long stopped bleeding, but there were definitely two-

A ripping wet cry forces itself from Hawke’s throat as Aveline finally lifts her from the ground and into sudden consciousness. Merrill leaps forward, pulled by the pain in her lover’s voice but also by a panicked clarity. Robes roll down Aveline’s strained legs and fall away from where they’d been pooled at her side to show just the hilt of the rogues lost dagger, flush against the aching reddened flesh of Hawke’s hip.

“Aveline!” Varric starts, but is cut off by another keeling jagged noise escaping around the bright red bubbles forming at Hawke’s mouth.

“What do we do, what do we do?” Merrill’s heart thunders and stops and flashes forward like lightening in her chest. Aveline drops to her knees again and cradles Hawke’s twitching body, eyes all-at-once opening with more lucidity than the sounds she was making suggested possible.

“Hawke. Hawke, you’re fine.” Aveline’s set jaw is almost enough to make you believe it, if it weren’t for the slowing bloom of red reaching outward at the dagger’s hilt. “We can’t take it out.” Aveline snaps at Varric - a conversation Merrill is only distantly aware of, “We don’t have the supplies for this kind of blood-loss. Who knows what it’s done to her insides.”

The dwarf’s sure tongue falters, unable to wrap around a solution. His hand half offering the poultices out of his body’s unconscious need to do something, even though it won’t be nearly enough.

Merrill pushes past the wall of stiffness she’d erected at the sound of Hawke’s voice and her hands fly to her cheeks, thumbs resting in the corners of her mouth, bursting bloody bubbles as they seep forward.

“Shh, vhenan. We’ll find something, we’ll do something. Y- you’ll be fine.” Merrill breaks her gaze with Hawke for a moment to peer at Aveline, their faces closer than they’d ever been, as she keeps Hawke’s body from falling to the ground, and the dagger as still as possible. But… the steeliness is gone now, melted into nothing but hot bright pain. Its absence cracks against something inside Merrill; no surety in that gaze now. She doesn’t know if she has enough for both of them.

Varric moves beside them to see the knife, nothing but rusty iron keeping the sliced pieces of Hawke’s guts together. She isn’t as slight as Merrill, it would probably have protruded from the elf’s other side, but the dagger isn’t far off from sticking the sharp tip of its blade through the flesh on Hawke’s adjacent hip. Even Blondie’s brand of swiftly knitting flesh won’t help the tangle of skewered organs inside her now.

The rough deepness of his voice is strangled as his tattered resolve comes to rest beside Aveline’s, “Daisy…”

“No.” She says, a lower darker sound, “this is Hawke. We have to _do_ something.” Even as she keeps her eyes on her lovers, trying to pull her from the brink with just the power of her need of this woman. She has to _know_ , she has to know she _isn’t aloud to leave_. A prickling metallic warmth meets her stomach, and magic begins to ricochet off the walls of her chest. It claws down her arms and threatens to erupt from her fingers in a mindless ache of simply requiring action in this moment.

“I’m so sorry,” Aveline chokes, Hawke’s eyes flutter closed as she straddles both worlds.

“Stop it!” Merrill snaps, “I won’t lose her.” The connection severs as her eyes slip closed and Merrill’s magic rips into Hawke’s body, unable to do anything but spread and shiver. The loneliness of these seconds choke Merrill’s barely breathed words and the others scarcely hear her as she whispers, “I _can’t_ lose her.”

Merrill’s hand flashes back from Hawke’s face, leaving a brief red glittering handprint that disappears into her flesh. She clamps her fingers around the blade and wrenches it out. Rust catching on the torn flesh, pulling an impossibly sickening tearing sound from the wound.

She aims at Aveline first – her strength already weighed up in the moments before the pull – and sinks the blade into her shoulder. Merrill is hardly practiced with weapons beyond her staff but she tries to aim for flesh and not bone or muscle or organs. She hopes it was high enough to miss her lungs.

Aveline rocks back, her arms coming away from Hawke’s body and it tumbles to the ground between them. Merrill pulls the blade back and slings it left, catching Varric across the chest in a deep gash as he leaps back in a cry. Finally she drags it across her forearm and blood runs into her fist.

The dagger drops, forgotten, as the blood of her friends rush to meet the daylight, escaping their veins and leaping into a glittering mist at Merrill’s command. She pulls life from their unwilling bodies, breaking their desire to protect themselves as they crash to the ground in a startled pained dance of twisting limbs and blood drawing into the world.

_Ir Abelas…_

It spatters Merrill’s arms and legs and face, as red sparks leap into her eyes and she continues to drag a torrent of life into a swinging tornado around her slight body. Her friends quickly cease thrashing, their forms resorting to weakened twitches of all the fight they have left.

Merrill clenches her fists in the mist, calling on whoever's – whatever's – help is willing and able. Then she slams her body down to the ground beside Hawke, pinning her hands to the woman’s chest.

She drives the blood through her clothes and skin and tissue, searching for the broken pieces and dragging the meat back together in a savagely wet sounding slew of makeshift stitches.

It isn’t the crisp blue pulse of Ander’s healing hands that regenerate torn skin, but the maddened raking of flesh as it is forced back together sucking up another’s hold on life as fuel. Still, the magic rockets through Hawke’s body and she convulses back to this side of the void. She drags in air, spitting out her own blood, rendered useless as she is filled with the warm red energy of her friends.

The torrent of red shudders and slows as Hawke shoots up, her violent cough echoing down the twisting paths of the Wounded Coast. Merrill slumps,

 _I can’t_ –

her limps beg for oxygen, but her body too exhausted to draw deeper breaths.

_lose you._

Silence is too loud a word for the moments that follow.

Merrill falls forward into Hawke’s lap, her hands finding their place in Hawke’s as the shocked brightness in her eyes turns to the choke of pain and anger. It’s the dull unpolished kind that is breathed after swift relief when emotions can’t simply be returned to their place.

“Hawke,” Merrill croaks, shifting her weight back and using her lover’s arms to fend off the crushing exhaustion. Hawke pulls their faces together and their cheeks sidle up to each other as she hugs her tightly, the mage returning the embrace as best she can.

“Merrill, what am I going to do with you?” there is a catch in her voice, the light humour barely a shifting chiffon sheet over the hooks stuck deep in the true meaning of the question.

On either side of their tangled bodies, Aveline and Varric begin to stir. Merrill’s stomach twists as she breaks the contact with Hawke and looks down at Aveline’s pale form, the wound in her chest puckering dryly without the foam of blood.

“Give us some warning before trying that one again, will you? I’m not ready to meet my ancestors just yet.” Varric is pushing himself up, his arms shakily stretched out behind him as support.

“You alright, Hawke?” his eyes glaze over their intimate hug and strike Aveline, body tensing, “Ave-” but he’s cut off by her soft wheeze.

Aveline doesn’t make a move to pull herself up into a sitting position, but she grunts unceremoniously, “when I’m up, there will be a reckoning.” Her voice is scratchy and cracked like wet scrunched paper that had been left to dry, but her tilted gaze betrays relief as she settles her eyes on Hawke.

“Holy mother of green cheeses, never thought I’d see that woman down.” Varric reaches to his side and picks up one of the old poultices he’d dropped. It isn’t often that he hits the ground, and these are probably a bit old but he sure isn’t going to be picky right now.

Merrill unsteadily twists behind her, snatching up the other poultice for Aveline, handing it to her with all the gentility she hadn’t shown a few moments ago, “This will help.”

Aveline gruffs, “it better.”

Merrill returns her gaze to Hawke, both of them not quite ready to be without the other’s touch. “Neat trick.” Hawke says softly, her hand coming to rest at the meeting of Merril’s neck and shoulder.

Varric laughs once without humour as he hauls himself to his feet, “let’s stow that as the backup of all backup plans, Daisy.”

Merrill slips her arms around Hawke’s chest and clasps her hands at the woman’s back, their foreheads coming to rest together. She smells of copper and baked earth and sweet sweat. She turns her head and brushes their lips together, the soft sweetness of Hawkes tongue almost masks the tang of blood still lingering.

“I can’t lose you.”

**Author's Note:**

> What am I even doing? What is 'ed-it-ing'? I don't know.
> 
> ***Elvish translation***  
> Vhanen = Heart (shortened version of the more formal "Ma Vhanen'ara" = My Heart's Desire)  
> Ir Abelas = I'm Sorry


End file.
